At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

August 21, 2014

(+++) THE ADVICE EXPERTS

Parenting on the Go: Birth to
Six, A to Z. By David Elkind, Ph.D. Da Capo. $14.99.

The Power of Positive
Confrontation: The Skills You Need to Handle Conflicts at Work, at Home,
Online, and in Life. By Barbara Pachter with Susan Magee. Da Capo. $16.99.

It is said that free advice
is worth exactly what you paid for it. But the advice in books can easily be
worth significantly more than their cost if you happen to be in the target
group being addressed and can extract enough specificity from the suggestions
to apply them to yourself and your everyday life. This is no small task: there
is so much information out there – and obviously not only in books – that
finding the relevant and useful information can be
extraordinarily difficult. A big plus of child psychologist David Elkind’s Parenting on the Go is that it makes it
comparatively simple to find what you are looking for – which then makes it
easy to decide whether Elkind’s views and recommendations will work for you.
The book is arranged from A to Z, so a quick glance at the Table of Contents
makes it simple to locate the material you want to find. This is not 100%
effective, because some of Elkind’s characterizations may be counterintuitive:
“Divorce” and “Emergencies” are under D and E, respectively, but “Preschool” is
under E (as “Education, Preschool”), and some categories may be ones you do not
know whether you want to check out (“Bad Theories, Bad Effects”). Still, the
contents listing is easy to skim, and so is much of the book itself, so if you
are not sure what a particular section is about, you can simply turn to it and
do a quick read. It will have to be quick: Elkind’s basic point here, an
entirely valid one, is that life is so complex and fast-paced nowadays that
parents do not have enough time to read through parenting books at a leisurely
pace – they need to find information speedily so they can use it as soon as
possible. The information itself is given here in easy-to-digest form, although
it sometimes is a trifle over-simplified, such as this in regard to “Fantasy,
The Uses Of”: “Young children think differently than we do. It is not a wrong
way of thinking, just different and age-appropriate.” Yet Elkind does not
hesitate to tackle difficult and complex issues, such as “Gender Identity”: “A
child does not wish to be born with a cross-sex preference. Indeed [the child]
may, initially at least, consider it a curse. And it is certainly not the fault
of parents. …For parents, the real challenge is to mourn for the child they had
hoped to have and to accept, love, and support the child that they were given.”
This last comment shows a strength of the book in Elkind’s plain-spokenness on
difficult subjects – and a weakness in that his style can make him seem blasé
about difficult, even wrenching parental matters. Parenting on the Go also offers little of the how information that parents may be seeking – as in how to learn to accept a child with a cross-sex
preference. Of course, giving that sort of information on all the subjects here
would be impossible; but Elkind does not even provide a list of further
resources, which could have been a helpful starting point. Still, within the
confines of a book designed to be fast and easy to consult, and not to be read
through cover-to-cover at all, he offers a great deal of helpful thinking on
subjects from Acid Reflux to Zoos, with such stops along the way as Chores for
Tots, Food Strikes, Military Children, Security Blankets and a great deal more.

The
Power of Positive Confrontation takes a different stylistic approach to a
more-adult subject. Instead of alphabetizing, Barbara Pachter and Susan Magee
“cuticize,” trying to pull readers in with chapter titles such as “The
Confrontational Road Less Traveled Is Paved by Bullies and Wimps,” “The Jerk
Test,” and “When You Get WAC’ed.” As you might expect, WAC is an acronym – they
are inordinately popular in self-help books. It stands for “three key steps in
gathering your words for a difficult conversation,” those being What is really bothering you, Asking the other person to do or change
something, and Checking In to find
out what the other person thinks about what you want. This is a more-tortured,
less-clear acronym than most, but because it sounds out as “whack,” it allows
Pachter and Magee to “cuticize” around it in many ways. Not that the cuteness
is the point here: The Power of Positive
Confrontation contains a number of useful ideas, if you do not mind getting
to them through the sometimes-annoying style. The authors point out, for
example, that “the W is not accusatory” – a very useful thing to know. “You
have a right to comment on another person’s behavior if it affects you. You
don’t have a right to verbally attack the other person.” Similarly, “you must
be specific about your A,” and “if you don’t know what to ask for, don’t
confront yet.” As for C, the point is that “just as it takes at least two
people to have a confrontation, it takes at least two to resolve a
confrontation” – which means you must connect (which would have been a better C
than “check in”) with the other person to be sure he or she has heard you and
will do what you ask. Pachter, a communications speaker and coach, and Magee,
an assistant professor of communications, provide a list of what they call “the
twelve most annoying behaviors,” and show how their WAC acronym can apply to
them. Readers may have their own list, which will probably not be as
alliterative as the one here – it includes “Space Spongers,” “Interjecting
Interrupters,” “Work Welchers,” “Annoying Askers” and so forth. Again, the
“cuticizing” tends to undermine the seriousness and effectiveness of the
authors’ recommendations, but if you can get through the presentation, the
ideas can be genuinely helpful. The core of what Pachter and Magee show is in
the book’s second section, “Making Positive Confrontation Work for You,” which
– although, again, infected by “cuticizing” – shows how to take techniques that
the authors repeatedly describe as “Polite and Powerful” and use them in many
different situations, both personal and professional. Read past the list-making
tendencies here and elsewhere in the book (“Eleven Simple Things You Can Do to
Have a Positive Confrontation,” “Twelve Simple Ways to Establish Rapport”), bypass
the overly cutesy chapter and section titles (“WAC’ing in Writing,” “WAC’ing by
Phone,” “Don’t WAC Behind Someone’s Back”), and you will find some genuinely
thoughtful approaches to managing confrontation effectively. A lot of the ideas
here are scarcely new: choose conflicts wisely, practice before confronting,
pick the right time and place, keep things short and simple, etc. But
conceptually easy is not the same as easy to implement, and the real value of The Power of Positive Confrontation lies
less in telling you what to do than in telling you how to do it. That value
helps overcome a writing style that tends to be too flippant for its own, and
readers’, good.